Pregnancies can be “bumpy” in more ways than one. It was a happy ending after a long wait. After many years of infertility, Rebecca finally conceived. You would expect nothing but joy. Instead, she is troubled.
Something strange was happening inside her. When she walked past a house of Torah study, the child stirred and struggled, as if desperate to get out and learn. When she passed a house of idolatry, the same thing happened.
Now Rebecca is worried. Is this child clever or confused, holy or heathen? Is he a schizophrenic, a meshugana?
The Torah in Genesis 25 says, “The children agitated within her,” and she went to seek Divine counsel. Anyone who has been a mother or has been married to one knows she was not the last woman to wonder what was going on inside her.
The answer she received: “Two nations are in your womb.” Not one troubled child but two: not identical twins but as different as day and night, Jacob and Esau. And Rashi explains that these two nations, Jacob’s and Esau’s descendants, will never be strong at the same time. When one rises, the other will fall. They will take turns, like a seesaw.
This ancient truth is history, but it is also our daily reality. Every one of us carries two kingdoms within us: a yetzer tov and a yetzer hara, a godly soul and an animal soul, conscience and temptation. Shall I get out of bed and go to synagogue, or press the snooze button and roll over? Shall I say the kind word or the cutting one? Each of us is a little Rebecca, with Jacob and Esau wrestling inside us.
If you believe that the struggle is with other people—with bad influences and a wicked world—then consider the old story of a Cherokee grandfather explaining to his grandson that two wolves live inside every person, each vying for supremacy.
The “evil wolf” represents anger, envy, greed, arrogance, guilt, resentment, lies and ego. The “good wolf” represents peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy, generosity, truth and compassion.
When the grandson asked which wolf would win, the grandfather replied: “The one you will feed.”
Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed, teaches that evil has no independent existence. It is a privation, an absence of good, the way blindness is the absence of sight and silence the absence of sound. Think about darkness. No one has ever bottled it, built with it or shipped it across the sea. Darkness is not a thing. It is simply the place where light has not yet arrived.
That explains why fighting evil head-on so often fails. How do you defeat something that has no substance? You can sweep a room all night, and the darkness will not move an inch. But strike one match, and it is gone. As King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “Wisdom has an advantage over folly, as light has an advantage over darkness.”
Notice that he doesn’t say light defeats darkness in battle. He says it has an advantage, a built-in superiority, because light is real and darkness is not.
The Rebbe would often say that a little light pushes away a great deal of darkness. The measure is not how big the dark room is, but whether there is a flame to illuminate it or not.
A rabbi once watched the town lamplighter making his rounds at dusk, going from lamp to lamp. He said to his students, “Do you see? He doesn’t argue with the darkness. He doesn’t chase it. He just lights a lamp, and the darkness disappears by itself.” That, he said, is how a Jew serves God.
This is the lesson of the seesaw. If we just push ourselves up, the other side goes down quite naturally. Nobody sits on the high end shouting “Down!” at the low end. You simply climb on and go up. Our job is not to push others down but to raise ourselves up. Trying to defeat Esau is a battle many of us have fought for decades without a clear victory.
Our job is to feed Jacob: one more mitzvah, one more kind word, one more page of Torah, one more Shabbat candle, one more act of generosity and compassion.
And the same applies to how we look at one another. We can be experts in what’s wrong or champions of what’s right. The latter is infinitely more pleasant and far more effective. People rise to the good we see in them. Build what’s good, and the faults will shrink on their own without a word from you.
So when you feel despondent about how much evil there is in the world, as we all do at times, remember that you were not put here to eliminate the darkness. You were put here to add some light. Rebecca worried about the struggle in her womb, but the Torah teaches us that the struggle is not a malfunction. It is the very purpose of our lives, and we win it not by fighting but by growing.
May we all be lamplighters and add more light to the world every day. Please, God, the darkness will vanish, and the kingdom of Jacob will rise higher until the whole world is bathed in its light.
